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Tuesday's Tip: Live Tweet Your Conference Notes

8/4/2014

This past weekend, I attended the 2014 Midwestern Roots conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was a great experience and I learned so much about practical tools and methods that will surely help me in my family history research.
When I have attended other seminars and small conferences in the past, I usually just kept a copy of the handouts/syllabus in front of me while jotting down extra notes here and there. During one conference, I had an PDF of the syllabus on my iPad and typed out notes and saved electronically.

But THIS time, I didn't take any notes other than the small blurbs that I posted on Twitter as the presentations were happening. I didn't have any extra or pens papers in front of me. Like every other larger conference, the organizers encouraged us to tweet using a unique hashtag, which I did include in every one of my tweets.

Let me tell you the benefits of this method of note-taking. First of all, I had no extra folders, papers, or pens in front of me; my space felt uncluttered, which was a nice feeling. Because I wasn't worried about copying down every single little thing, I LISTENED better to each presenter, and I'm pretty sure I retained MORE of their information. Twitter limits you to 140 total characters, and since part of every tweet was the hashtag and presenter's name, sometimes I only had around 120 characters to work with. I had to craft each "note" in the most succinct way possible, and that forced me to pull out only the most important elements of each point the presenter was trying to make. If I wanted to remember a particular source, website, or book that the presenter was talking about, I tweeted that, too.

I tweeted a LOT. I'm not sure how most of my followers felt about that, but I had quite a few retweets, and at least one of my followers (who was not at the conference) said she was enjoying reading through the tweets. I liked the fact that I was sharing what I was learning with others, AND I was enjoying reading through other attendees' tweets who were in other sessions. (Don't you wish you could attend ALL the sessions?? I do.)

After the conference ended, I went to my twitter account, searched the conference hashtag (#MWR2014), and ALL the tweets with that hashtag showed up (even from people who I did not follow or who did not follow me).

Screenshot of Twitter account after searching #MWR2014

#MWR2014 Twitter feed imported into Evernote account

Even better? You can SAVE the Twitter search in your Evernote, and have a complete record of everyone's tweets and photos from the conference in one easily-accessible location! Even if you don't think that this method of note-taking at conferences is right for you, you should still get a Twitter account (it's free), search the conference hashtag, and take advantage of the information that fellow colleagues are posting.

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CIAO Italian Genealogy Seminar

6/27/2014

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This past weekend, I attended the Cleveland Italian Ancestry Organization (CIAO) Italian Genealogy Seminar at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio. The all-day seminar featured two nationally-known expert Italian genealogists: Paola Manfredi, AG and Suzanne Russo Adams, AG, both of whom are currently employed with FamilySeach.org.

The seminar consisted of four main presentation sessions, with each presenter speaking simultaneously on a different topic, so I had to choose which talks I wanted to attend for each session. I attended Suzanne's first session, entitled 'Beginning Italian Research,' and, although I do not consider myself a beginner, it was a great review of some of the documents and resources I already know about. And, I actually learned things that I didn't know about, especially with regards to the hierarchy of how the records in Italy are made and where they are kept.

During the second session, I attended Paola's talk entitled, 'Post Napoleonic Civil Records in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.' Her previous presentation was about Napoleonic Civil Records, and she did give a little review of how the recording of civil records differed between the two periods. (Quick note: Both presenters did a great job of explaining the history behind the record-keeping, which was both interesting and helpful.) Paola showed us a lot of examples of actual birth, marriage, and death records so that we could get a feel for how they are arranged, which really helps in picking out the important information. Before this seminar, I was pretty intimidated by records written in Italian. However, I've learned that once you can recognize certain repetitive words and phrases, deciphering the information within the records becomes much easier. Here is the link to FamilySearch.org's educational page on Italian civil records.

I stayed with Paola for the third session. She presented on Italian military records, which a.) I knew nothing about and b.) I wanted to learn about because my great-grandfather served in the Italian Army during WWI. This presentation was fascinating; Paola spoke about the liste di leva, which lists information about ALL 18 year old men in a particular comune (town). Not only can you discover a man's parents' names from these records, but they also include a physical description of each 'draftee.' We also looked at a sample ruoli matricolari record, which is basically a description of a soldier's entire military service. While many state archives throughout Italy have started to put indexed records online, Sicily (where my great-grandfather was from) has not yet done so. (FamilySearch.org has a nice summary of Italian Military Records at this link.)

For the fourth and final session, I went back to listen to Suzanne present about online Italian research resources. She gave us a list of fifty websites that could potential help us with our Italian ancestor research. She highlighted a few of her favorites, including the Portale Antenanti, which contains over 19 million images from state archives all over Italy. Suzanne really emphasized trying to learn about your ancestor's hometown and the region's history, even before you delve into the search for individual records. She told us to try to Google location names in Italian, because doing so will likely yield more results. Currently, there are 30(!) cameras all over Italy, digitizing records that will soon be made available on FamilySearch.org (for LDS members) AND on the Portale Antenanti (for everyone). So, Suzanne told us, if your ancestors are nowhere to be found online as of yet, they probably will be there soon. Exciting news, for sure!

Overall, it was a great seminar. I learned a lot, and had an enjoyable time, too! We were served a yummy, yummy lunch and there was even a raffle of some great Italian- and genealogy-related books, food, and gift certificates. We were given awesome, comprehensive syllabus materials and a neat bag in which to carry everything. The price ($45) was very reasonable, and I hope the organization sponsors something like this again in the future.

CIAO Italian Genealogy Seminar Materials and Hand-Outs

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Establishing Genealogical Proof with Thomas W. Jones

3/31/2014

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This past Saturday, I was at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio to attend an all-day seminar with Thomas W. Jones, renowned genealogist, speaker and educator, and author of the the book, Mastering Genealogical Proof. The title of the seminar was Establishing Genealogical Proof and the day's full itinerary can be viewed here.

Dr. Jones first talked about the Genealogical Proof Standard. Most importantly, he spoke about WHY it is needed, and emphasized that establishing proof in genealogy is not the same as certainty or finality. We are never really "done" researching our family - there may always be 'new' evidence that comes to light that will add to our ancestors' stories.

In the second presentation, Dr. Jones talked about how to compare and contrast (correlate) evidence to attempt to clearly and accurately answer a particular question about an ancestor. He showed us ways in which to use narratives, lists, timelines, tables, and even maps to carry out this process of correlation. He spoke about the importance of determining independence of sourcesbefore beginning the process of correlation, and that at least two independent sources are necessary before correlation can take place.

After lunch, Dr. Jones talked what we can do as researchers and family history writers when sources do not agree with each other. He addressed WHY records may disagree and how errors can creep into "official" documents, either intentionally or unintentionally. He showed us several methods of resolving conflicting evidence and provided examples of how to address conflicting evidence when writing our family histories.

His final presentation was crowd-interactive. He gave us a research question and asked us to suggest online sources that could possibly be used to fill in the holes of one particular man's life story. The case study showed the usefulness of researching indirect ancestors in order to answer questions about one direct ancestor. And, this case study showed that we still DO need offline sources of records to truly put together a comprehensive picture of an ancestor's life.

This was not the first time that I've heard Dr. Jones speak; last year, I attended the Ohio Genealogical Society Annual Conference, at which he gave the keynote speech, and, while there, I also attended his shorter talk on documentation. I enjoyed this day-long seminar more than his shorter presentations at OGS. It was more in-depth than his shorter presentations, and he did a great job of using real examples and problems that he himself has encountered in his research. He emphasized that a successful genealogical researcher must have a 'piecing-together-the-puzzle' attitude as opposed to an 'I found it!' attitude, which is a key point that has stuck with me over the past few days. If you ever get an opportunity to hear him speak, you must jump at it - you will learn so much!

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A Seminar With Cyndi Ingle

3/22/2014

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Today, at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis, Indiana, I attended an all-day seminar given by Cyndi Ingle. For those who aren't familiar with Cyndi, she is the creator of Cyndi's List, which is a website containing the MOST comprehensive listing of ALL genealogy-related websites - research sites, database sites, methods and organization sites, history sites, blogs - everything. She is quite famous within the genealogy community, so I was glad that she came to Indy and that I had the opportunity to hear her speak. The seminar was entitled, "Genealogy Online: Productive, Organized and Successful."

Each attendee was given a nice booklet containing all of Cyndi's presentation notes, which I really appreciated, because it meant I could relax and pay more attention to exactly what she was saying, instead of worrying about taking notes to try to remember it all. (I was also able to do some live tweeting, too, which I enjoyed!)

Seminar Booklet

Of course, Cyndi took us through her website, explained HOW it was organized and highlighted some of the main categories of links found there. She gave us some great tips about how to develop a research plan, and she was even kind enough to provide us with links to templates to help us make a research plan of our own. She talked a lot about using Evernote in genealogy research, which I wasn't necessarily expecting, but I'm glad she did. I do have an Evernote account; however, I do not use it regularly in my research and my Evernote notes and notebooks are not as organized as I would like them to be. Cyndi showed us Evernote's full capabilities as far as aiding in genealogy research and organization. And there's an entire section on her website listing links that are helpful in learning and using Evernote for family history research.

Here are a few main points of her talk that really stuck with me:

- Even when you go through an entire database and find NOTHING helpful in learning about a particular ancestor, it is still a step forward as far as your research process goes. (So many of us get discouraged when this happens, but now we are free to "check off" that record set and move onto the next potential source of information.)

- Take research notes along every step of the way. Cyndi referred to it as 'having an ongoing dialogue with yourself.' This is so important when you have to leave your research alone for a period of time. We need to know exactly what we were working on and where we left off in the search, especially so we don't backtrack and search the same database or record set AGAIN to no avail.

- Genealogy research is a circular process; there is no end. She showed us this GREAT graphic from the FamilySearch.org Research Process Wiki, which really helped me better visualize what a successful research process looks like.

- Speaking of visualization, she reminded us to try to visualize our research as much as possible. Using timelines and maps of migration and immigration patterns can all be extremely helpful when we are trying to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

If you ever get the chance to hear Cyndi speak live, please be sure that you do! She is an engaging speaker and you can tell that she really loves what she does. After her seminar today, I am so much more motivated to put more of my research in Evernote, and to be more meticulous in making research plans and keeping better research notes.

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Timelines at The Indiana Historical Society

6/22/2013

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This morning, I went to the Indiana Historical Society in downtown Indianapolis and attended a talk about family history timelines presented by Betty L. Warren, one of the Historical Society's professional genealogy researchers. She showed us several timelines and personal chronologies that she had set up for her family and one of her client's families (actually, the current governor of Indiana). It was very helpful to see a couple of different formats for timelines. She even showed us a way to incorporate some basic source citations into the timelines themselves. I also really like how she showed us how to visualize overlap among family members of different generations using simple colored posterboard:

Sample timelines made by Betty L. Warren.

To summarize her main points, timelines are great for genealogy research because:

1.) They allow you to visualize an ancestor's major life events all at once. Very helpful for making sure that dates make sense (for example, if a U.S. land grant happened before the person's immigration date, you know something is wrong there).

2.) Timelines enable you to see the gaps in your data. So, timelines themselves are a very helpfulresearch tool that should be used even when you don't have a lot of life 'events' to put into the timeline.

3.) Placing a historical timeline next to a personal timeline can help you understand WHY your ancestor immigrated, or moved, or joined the military, or contracted cholera, etc.

4.) Making timelines, either on poster board or on a computer, is inexpensive. Most genealogy software these days does have the ability to construct timelines for you, but you don't NEED those programs to do it. She showed us a simple way to use Microsoft Word to construct a basic timeline.

5.) Timelines are great ways to get kids involved in family history research. My children are still too young to understand many genealogical concepts, like generations and historical context, BUT they DO understand life events, like being born, going to school, getting married, having children, etc. I can make a timeline for my great-grandmother and visually show them that she did all of these things, even if they don't yet 'get' the scope of how long ago these things occurred.

Betty L. Warren's contact information can be found on this web page.
Cyndi's List also has a great collection of websites that can help you create family history timelines and world history timelines.

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Highlights from OGS 2013

4/28/2013

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Source: Wikipedia Commons

I returned home yesterday after spending three days in Cincinnati for the annual conference of the Ohio Genealogical Society. It was a wonderful experience and I learned a lot more than I though I would. The Millennium Hotel in Downtown Cincinnati provided very nice facilities for the event and ALL of the OGS volunteers with whom I interacted were exceptionally helpful and cordial. Thank you to the OGS for making my first genealogy conference experience a positive one!

What did I come away with? Here are some of my highlights and favorite tips that I learned:

1.) I attended two lectures by Dr. Thomas W. Jones, who is a nationally-known genealogical researcher, educator, and author. He gave a thorough and informative keynote address at the start of the conference on Thursday on the subject of finding "unfindable" ancestors. I also attended his lecture on genealogical documentation, which, prior to this talk, I knew almost nothing about. The latter lecture left me quite overwhelmed and intimidated, which is rare for me when it comes to anything scholarly. I understand why thorough documentation is needed in genealogical research, but there just seem to be so many "rules" when it comes to genealogical citations that I feel like I would never get it right. Dr. Jones is VERY knowledgeable on the subject and seems to be a good teacher, but I left that talk longing for one of my mathematically-based homework sets from graduate school.

2.) I attended two of the German-track lectures by Dr. Michael D. Lacopo. If you ever have a chance to hear him speak, I highly recommend it. Not only does he give some great tips, but he is witty and tells some great stories. Interestingly, he started out as a veterinarian, but has years of experience in genealogy and has become a professional expert. His path to genealogy proficiency has given me hope, because I also have a background in science but also have come to love genealogy.

3.) I learned about the importance of utilizing Gazetteers in European research. What is a gazetteer? A gazetteer is more or less a geographical directory. It is a publication that lists and describes villages, cities, and counties of a particular country or region. For German research, THE gazetteer to use is the Meyers Gazetteer of the German Empire, which was published 1912-1913 and lists information for 210,000+ locations in pre - World War I Germany. This publication is available at most larger libraries AND on digitally on Ancestry.com as well. So now, I can look up some of my husband's ancestral villages (well, the ones I know the names of) and learn about what trades were in the town, how many churches and schools there were, population, transportation, and government infrastructure. SUCH a useful tool.

4.) Speaking of European research, several of the speakers very much emphasized doing exhaustive research on immigrant ancestors IN AMERICA, before tracking down records in Europe. This makes a lot of sense to me, so I'm going to focus a lot more of my research efforts on trying to gather American church records and documents for my and my husband's ancestors. That's not to say that I won't still order a Family History Library microfilm or two every now and then, but I know there is still so much more that I can find here first.

5.) And that sort of leads me to my next highlight: Many of the speakers advocated obtaining church records, as opposed to just civil records, whenever possible. Parish pastors and ministers often kept track of MORE family information than what is simply listed on county or town marriage records, for instance. Sometimes that little bit of extra information can help you break through a brick wall, especially when it comes to identifying parentage or what village your ancestor came from in the Old Country.

6.) I have been instructed NOT to be intimidated of church records hand-written in German script OR German-language newspapers printed in what is known as 'Fraktur' typeface. Several of the speakers advocated practicing handwriting in German script letters to become familiar with the how the letters are formed and what they look like. I actually feel like learning this is something that is way more attainable for me than the documentation stuff.

7.) Obtaining your ancestors' U.S. military records is NOT as difficult as you may think. I went to a great presentation by Michael L. Strauss about how to locate and obtain WWII records. Military personnel records for discharges before 1951 are considered public record and can be obtained by anyone through filling out a form. Unfortunately, a massive fire in 1973 destroyed 80% of the Army and Air Force OMPFs (Office Military Personnel Files). The other branches' OMPFs were not affected. So, I plan on requesting the file of my grandmother, who served in the Coast Guard during WWII. My grandfather served in the Army during WWII, so there is a pretty good chance that his OMPF is gone. However, Mr. Strauss told us that the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis also keeps the 'Morning Reports' for each military branch on file, so those can help fill some gaps in where my grandfather was located and what he was doing at different points of his service. Morning Reports, however, can only be obtained by physically going to the facility in St. Louis. Road trip!

8.) Google Earth can be used to make 'family history videos' that you can email to family members or place on a webpage or blog. This mini-presentation in the exhibition hall was given by Lisa Louise Cooke. Basically, you can import videos, photos, documents - anything really - into Google Earth and plot them on a map AND you can even overlay historical maps onto the current-day Google satellite views. She showed us a video she made about some of her ancestors and it looked like a really cool way to tell a family's story and make it interesting even for people who are not genealogy-inclined. I can't wait to try this with my family's history.

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Preparing for the OGS Conference

4/21/2013

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Cincinnati, Ohio (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Over the past few days, I have put my research on hold in order to spend my few free moments preparing for the annual Ohio Genealogical Society conference that I will be attending next Thursday through Saturday in Cincinnati, Ohio. This will be my first genealogy conference. I'm excited, but a little nervous at the same time. I've been researching my and my husband's families for a couple of years now, but I know I am still very much a newbie in the world of genealogy and family history research. I'm a pretty fast learner, so I'm not too worried about 'getting lost' in any of the sessions or anything, but I am hoping there are other non-professional 'hobbyists' there too so I won't feel to out of place next to the professionals. I'm also nervous because I won't see my husband or kids for three days, which will be a nice break for me, but it's something that is out of the ordinary for me, so, of course, I worry. :-)

The conference this year is in Cincinnati, which is great because I am already very familiar with the city. (We lived in northern Kentucky for nearly five years and during that time I got to know the city very well.) The conference organizers have arranged for the Main Branch of the Cincinnati Public Library to stay open after hours on Thursday so that conference attendees may do some evening genealogy research. Today, I've been going through the library's online catalog and printing out holding information for books and microfilms that I may like to look at. I've also been spending some time looking through the conference's schedule and syllabus (notes for each presentation), and deciding which sessions I will attend. Because the conference is in Cincinnati this year, there is a pretty heavy focus on German genealogy and heritage. My husband has a lot of German ancestors, so I will hopefully learn a lot about how to learn about those lines, but I'm also a little bummed that there doesn't seem to be much to aid me in tracing my Italian, Croatian, and Polish ancestors who settled in Cleveland. They have the conference in a different part of the state each year, so I'm sure at some point I will have a chance to attend one of their conferences that will help me more with that aspect of my research.

So, hopefully I will be able to write a blog post or two while I am at the conference, just to summarize what I've learned and to talk about the experience overall. Stay tuned!

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Tuesday's Tip: Live Tweet Your Conference Notes

CIAO Italian Genealogy Seminar

Establishing Genealogical Proof with Thomas W. Jones

A Seminar With Cyndi Ingle

Timelines at The Indiana Historical Society

Highlights from OGS 2013

Preparing for the OGS Conference

Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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